“I don’t remember.” She rubs a tickle from the palm of her hand.
“You were talking about a speckled egg—”
“Not speckled, blue.”
“A robin’s egg?”
Madeleine takes a deep breath and looks down.
The grass is thick with neglected objects no longer confined to the room at the top of her head; she is finding pieces everywhere, strewn underfoot, collecting in the cracks of sidewalks, reflected in the blur of subway trains. The mystery is how they have managed to stay intact long enough to be found, these breakable things, fragile as butterfly wings, perishable as childhood, spilling like fluff from dandelions and cattails — catch one, make a wish, release it back onto the breeze — glittering like stolen silver in a nest.
It is as though she has hit upon the magic words to make these objects glow so that they can be found. But they are not “magic,” they are just words. Not spells, just spelling. Names. Perhaps that is what magic is. Claire.
THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS
“Oh dear! I’d nearly forgotten that I’ve got to grow up again! Let me see — how is it to be managed?”
“DID GEORGIA O’KEEFFE ever do butterflies?” asks Madeleine, settling into the swivel chair, cross-legged, warming her feet in her hands.
“I’m not sure,” says Nina.
“I dreamt I found a Georgia O’Keeffe print like the one you have here, and it made me so happy to know that you and I both had the same picture. Except in my dream it was this incredible butterfly. Huge and bright yellow like the sun.” Madeleine gazes at the serene skull and horns.
She has grieved in the best therapeutic tradition. She has “come to terms with her abuse,” she has wept and called the police. Surely her work here in terracotta-land is done. Me go home now.
“I’m seeing someone,” she says.
Nina listens.
“I’m um … happy. Isn’t that weird?”
Nina smiles.
“I feel like part of me is awake and that part’s really happy. But it has to drag around this other part. This dead-weight like an unconscious patient. It’s me. My eyes are closed, I’m in this blue hospital gown.” She crinkles her face. “How transparent am I, doc?” She waits. “The girl in the blue dress. It’s like she grew up in a coma.”
“In your dreams your legs feel heavy.”
As though something were weighing me down. A body. Mine.
The OPP have not been able to tell her anything but she has been assured they are on it. She doesn’t intend to wait while the bureaucratic wheels grind, however. She has a meeting with a lawyer tomorrow. She is going to bring charges. It’s the right thing to do.
“What kind of charges?” asks Nina.
“What do you mean? Sexual assault, of course.”
Just as Madeleine had never been able fully to comprehend that people and places went on changing after the McCarthys were posted away, so a child’s world, though crowded with fantasy, coloured by faith in talking animals and time travel, is in fact rigidly ordered and unchanging. Policemen are always smiling and uniformed — you never picture one in a lawn chair with a beer. Butchers wear white coats and stand behind counters, they do not shop themselves, or go to the doctor wearing an ordinary shirt. Teachers are unimaginable outside school — you may see them on their way to their car, but they fall off the edge of the earth when they leave the parking lot, only to rematerialize the next morning at the front of the class, appropriately attired.
It was a breach of reality when Mr. March did what he did after three, but reality healed around it like a mysterious nub in the bark of a tree. Part of being able to accommodate this breach — to dilate normalcy — meant applying to it the same rigid laws of childhood physics: this is what happens after three. It happens in the classroom. Up by his desk. Just as the butcher never shops for broccoli, the policeman never plays croquet and the milkman is never without his truck, the things that happen in the classroom after three could never happen anywhere else.
Through the earth-toned portal of Nina’s office, Madeleine has returned to the classroom, she has watched the child, she has lifted the bandage and smelled how rank the wound, exposed it to air so that it too can re-enter time and begin to change, to seal itself. She has listened faithfully, but has yet to translate the child’s story into adult language. So she has not truly heard it. She is just one more grown-up who nods and loves but can do nothing to help.
She cups her hands over her face and inhales.
“You feeling faint?” asks Nina.
Madeleine shakes her head. “I still have to do it sometimes. Smell my hands. Weird, eh?” She grins. “My brother used to razz me about it.”
Something so simple will be gained in the translation. Something that adults take for granted as they freely walk the earth, unbounded by bedtimes and the reproach of vegetables uneaten on the plate: Teachers can leave the classroom. They can leave the parking lot in their car. They can drive along a dirt road to a place where the fence has been left cordially unmended by the farmer. They can descend to the ravine at Rock Bass with a fragile blue egg sheltered in the palm of one big hand, then up the other side and, in their brown brogues that the children have only ever seen on asphalt or school linoleum, they can walk across the newly turned cornfield to the meadow beyond, where an elm tree stands….
“Why do you do it?”
“To clean them. To inhale a bad smell off them. Obsessive compulsive, right? You should be paying me.”
“What does it smell like?”
“Well there isn’t really a smell.”
“What do you imagine it smells like?”
“You’re good. Okay, it’s uh, clammy. It’s a yellow smell.”
“Yellow? You mean like urine?”
“No, just … yellow.”
She has yet to translate the bold text and pictures of her child’s story into the fine print of adulthood. When she does, she will be able to tell it back to the child. Tell it gently. The terrible story that the child does not know she knows.
She flexes her fingers, closing and opening her fists, this is the way to feel that your hands will not be chopped off.
“Does that help the smell to go away?” asks Nina.
Madeleine notices her hands swivelling on her wrists. “No.” She relaxes them on the armrests and they go ice-cold. She takes a deep breath and sits on them.
“I think maybe I did it.”
“Did what?”
“Killed her.”
“Why do you think that?”
“Because I can see her lying there.”
“You saw yourself, we know that.”
“But I have such a clear picture of her.”
“Can you describe the picture?”
“I can, I can — I see the grass tamped down like someone had a picnic there, you know?”
“Madeleine. Can you see her face?”
“We saw a deer.”
“Who did?”
“Me and Colleen and Rex.”
“Can you see Claire’s face?”
“Mm-hm.”
“What does it look like?”
“She’s sleeping?”
“Can you describe her hair? You said she was wearing a hair-band.”
“Barrettes, yeah, and she had on her charm bracelet.”
“What about her eyes?”
“They’re closed.”
“What about the rest of her face, Madeleine? Her mouth, her cheeks?”
“She looks peaceful but she’s pale because, well, she’s dead.”
“Madeleine?”
Madeleine looks up.
Nina says gently, “When people die of strangulation, their eyes stay open. They change colour, they don’t … it doesn’t look anything like your picture.”